The colony he founded is now the largest of the United States east of the Mississippi. James Edward Oglethorpe was born in 1696 in London and was educated at Oxford. He gained valuable military experience in the Austrian army fighting the Turks. Oglethorpe chaired a parliamentary committee charged with prison reform. It inspired him and […]
This could be your lucky day and not just because you’re reading this. In Georgia, lotteries have been around since the 18th century. Indian lands were distributed through a lottery in the 19th century. Governor Zell Miller campaigned promising an education lottery, and in 1991 the legislature passed an amendment to Georgia’s constitution that designated […]
His companies, and the money they made, impact Georgia to this day. William Clark Bradley was born in 1863 on an Alabama cotton plantation. He moved to Columbus in 1885 to work for a cotton factor. He and his brother-in-law bought the company soon after and in 1888 started the two Columbus banks that in […]
Since early May 1864 U.S. General William Tecumseh Sherman had been moving south from Tennessee toward Atlanta, with Joe Johnston’s Confederates blocking his path. Every flanking move Sherman made, Johnston countered, frustrating Sherman’s plans. Finally, Sherman’s patience snapped. No more flanking. He would attack Johnston head on and destroy his army. It would be the […]
Americans may love individual liberties, but there is a social engineering streak in some of us a mile wide—and when reformers can’t persuade, they try to pass laws. Prohibition in the United States goes back to the 1820s and 30s, during the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening. Evangelical Protestants organized both temperance […]
If Atlanta loses one more hockey team, it will be a hat trick. Hockey and the Deep South have always been something of a forced marriage. The Flames arrived in Atlanta in 1972 and reached the NHL playoffs six times in eight years playing at the Omni. But after years of low attendance and financial […]
Prohibition and voting rights for women: they were the twin passions of Mary Latimer McLendon. Mary Latimer was the younger sister of outspoken suffragist Rebecca Latimer Felton. She was born in DeKalb County in 1840 and graduated from the Southern Masonic Female College in Covington. After the Civil War, McLendon became active in the Women’s […]
He was the highest-ranking Native American to fight for the Confederacy, but years before the Civil War, Stand Watie was nearly assassinated by fellow Cherokees for what they saw as betrayal. Watie was born near New Echota, in Georgia, in 1806. That’s the same place where he and three other Cherokees signed the Treaty of […]
Getting the stuff to do it yourself got a lot easier on this day in 1979 when the first two Home Depots opened. Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank started a chain of large home improvement warehouses that would stock more products, often at lower prices than any competitor or hardware store. Employees knew what was […]
In July 1979, two 14-year-old boys went missing. When police found the bodies of Edward Hope Smith and Alfred Evans, it began a two-year nightmare that held Atlanta in the grip of fear. A serial killer was on the loose, and in the end at least 28 children, teenagers, and adults were victims in what […]
